


watch who you greet in the woods, my child; you never know who else is there

by Curlscat



Category: The Sisters Grimm - Michael Buckley
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-31
Updated: 2020-01-31
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:14:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22486927
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Curlscat/pseuds/Curlscat
Summary: Light horror outsider perspective on FPL.
Comments: 15
Kudos: 28





	watch who you greet in the woods, my child; you never know who else is there

**Author's Note:**

  * For [advisortotheadvisor](https://archiveofourown.org/users/advisortotheadvisor/gifts), [sasspan](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sasspan/gifts).



> I'm PRETTY sure advisortotheadvisor is the one who talked about how creepy FPL must be to someone who's not in the know. @sasspan over on tumblr recently wrote her take on the idea, and it spurred me on to finish mine!

There are things we don’t talk about in Ferryport Landing. Because talking about them? It doesn’t end well.

So we keep our mouths closed and our heads down, and mostly that keeps us safe ( _ mostly _ .  _ Don’t tell the newcomers; even if they understood we might be overheard _ ).

When someone’s memory of the day before is fuzzy, we don’t ask. When he tells you one day that he saw a giant crush his house, and the next day he insists it was a localized earthquake, we  _ do not press _ (even if it looks like a footprint).

If you push too hard for answers that make sense, after they’ve changed their stories? Something in them breaks. They go blank faced and smiley, and they repeat the same vague explanation, sometimes for hours.

Sometimes longer.

Some people never recover, stay stuck in an echo of something, like a scratched CD.

There’s a mental hospital up on Mount Taurus. Nobody talks about why a town this small would need a mental institution, but it’s up there. (The broken-record people used to get brought up there, and we’d never see them again. Sometimes we forgot them—  _ but of course we didn’t forget, Steven never had a brother, maybe he should see someone about these dreams he’s been having, because they’re just too strange _ .)

The institution closed down about fifteen years ago. Nobody ever said where the patients went. Even those of us who had family there never found out what happened to them. ( _ what family _ ?)

If you hike the mountain, you can hear noise coming from the hospital, still. The kids say it’s haunted. Every once in a while, someone will get the idea to go urban exploring, or to take a photo shoot, and they’ll hike up to the old asylum. If they’re lucky, they won’t see anything. ( _ children in old fashioned clothes and a flash of scales in the dark _ )

If they’re a little less lucky, someone will find them, shaking and terrified, on the road later.

If they’re not lucky? We won’t see them again ( _ deep scratches in the trees, bloodstained rocks, sounds like a waterfall in the distance but we don’t have waterfalls in Ferryport Landing _ ).

The ones who make it back tell stories about monsters and the ghosts of little girls, about screams and teeth and playing house. They’re always afraid of cats, after. And the color red ( _ they don’t leave the path after that. They’ve learned their lessons _ ).

Of course, Ferryport Landing is the kind of town that’s perfectly set up for this sort of group superstition. It’s alone, hemmed in on one side by the mountains and on the other by the river, with only a single highway in and out, and the train.

And the forest presses in on everything.

It’s always dark, the forest. In summer it’s the dense press of leaves that blocks out more light than it ought to, more light than in other woods. In winter? The sun sets early and rises late, and the shadows stretch long towards the north even at noon ( _ we’ll never see full sun, it feels like _ ). 

It’s always like this, always dark, always with strange noises. We don’t mention it. We try not to think about it too much. If you’re stupid enough to go walking in the woods, don’t stop to pet the orange cat you meet. Definitely don’t talk to the old woman with no road leading up to her house ( _ it’s probably a Halloween decoration, her fence. It can’t be real bones _ ).

We stay, of course, because despite all this? Crime rates are low. So very, very low. We’ve got a police force of four for a town of thousands, and the cops do almost nothing. (They don’t have to. The last time there was a murder  _ the last time we can remember that there was a murder there have been others haven’t there? Of course not. There has never been a murder in Ferryport Landing _ — the last time there was a murder was 1957, and the murderer appeared at the police station a few days later, shaking and begging to confess, to be locked up. He talked about wolves.) So we stick to our safe jobs in our safe town and we simply don’t pay attention to the things we aren’t supposed to notice.

Don’t acknowledge the shadows flying overhead. Don’t go out at night if you hear a strange noise. Don’t, don’t, don’t acknowledge that photos of the mayor in the newspaper in the 1920s look the exact same as the ones in today’s paper ( _ or the photos of your mother’s first grade class. Or the hairdresser who did your grandmother’s wedding perm. Or, or, or— _ ).

A thousand little don’ts. A thousand ways to keep ourselves safe.

A thousand brittle smiles, and a hundred thousand gaps in our memories.

Maybe, maybe, if we’re never rude to the wrong people, if we keep our eyes to the floor and pretend we don’t hear, we’ll be allowed to stay. ( _ Maybe it’s better if we don’t _ .)


End file.
